What about Euler[1] for example? (I don't think he used drugs though)
Anyway, I agree with your comment in the sense that intelligence, talent or success are not mutually exclusive with drugs.
What about Euler[1] for example? (I don't think he used drugs though)
Anyway, I agree with your comment in the sense that intelligence, talent or success are not mutually exclusive with drugs.
Erdos published more papers with more collaborators than Euler.
Euler published more pages of material and founded more areas of research than Erdos. (Yes, Euler has the benefit of having had people think about his stuff longer, and attribute more to inspiration from him. But Erdos won't ever come close to catching up.)
I think that Arthur Cayley is in third place on both measures.
Imagine if Erdos had been around before Euler? Who's to say that he wouldn't have discovered some or more of what Euler discovered. The earlier discoveries were the easier one, the low-hanging fruit.
If I went back in time it would be easier for me to make some ground breaking discovery, like pythagoras theorem. But today, I need to be smarter and more clever than centuries of mathematicians to add something new to our collective knowledge of the universe. All of the easy problems are solved :(
Now, go back in time and <em>take away all your knowledge</em> (and the knowledge that there was a theorom to be discovered in the first place) and see how easy it would be for you to discover that theorom.
Perhaps some people are blessed with the creativity and vision to see a blank canvas as full of ideas. Other people have to resort to aids to get to that point. Yet otherer people probably couldn't get there even with aids.